Saturday, 22 September 2012

Luang Prabang

Arriving at
the pier in Luang Prabang you are surrounded by touts trying to tell you all
about their hotels and guesthouses. We must have ended up with about seven
pamphlets by the time we finally got out onto the road. We pretty much ignored
the pamphlets we were given and headed out to find a guesthouse. We walked past
a fair few asking how much before we finally settled on a quaint little
guesthouse tucked nicely away down a side street. The guesthouse catered to
Korean travellers, some coincidence, they had a soju stocked fridge, a menu
with kimchi soup on it and Korean writing scattered around on signs.

One
pamphlet did come in handy and it was advertising a restaurant called the Lao
Lao garden. We had wanted to try Lao barbeque since hearing about it in the
border town of Huay Xai so we got pretty excited. My belly was finally
feeling back to some level of normality so we set out into town to find the
restaurant. Luang Prabang is a beautiful little town with lots of hangovers
from the French occupation. It’s a green city lined with golden steeples, beautiful
French architecture sits next to small Asian inspired buildings, and monks in
orange robes walk through the streets day and night, (that is until midnight when curfew kicks in). Laos has a government curfew that states
that every person must be in their legally registered residence by midnight, or else. This law seems pretty
loose as far as foreigners are concerned and most police won’t bother you,
however, if you are Lao then rest assured you had better be home by midnight, so all the bars and restaurants
start shutting up at around 11 / 11:30pm.

Anyway,
onto the Lao Lao garden. It’s a great restaurant with a great menu, and we
ordered our Lao barbeque. It’s very much like Korean barbeque but with a slight
twist. You start by pouring some seasoned water around the edge of the pan and
into that you throw a bunch of cabbage, glass noodles, lettuce, tomato, some
egg and a few other salad type items, then in the raised middle you cook your
meat, we had chicken, pork and buffalo. It was delicious. What was even more
interesting about the Lao Lao garden was that the menu informed you about Lao
culture, it had a kind of FAQ page at the back, and I learnt a lot by reading
this, let me share what I learnt…

Laos is one
of the most remote and one of the poorest countries in the world, when you
barter or argue over a few thousand kip with a Lao person then you are arguing
over a few pence or a few pounds with somebody whom if their family gets sick,
they die, because they can’t afford medical care. The average Lao person stays
in a bamboo hut with about ten other people with no water and no electricity
(you actually see a lot of Lao washing themselves under waterfalls or in the Mekong river, and washing their clothes
the same way). They grow their own food and will rarely, if ever, eat meat. In
fact the ONLY things made in Laos are basic farm crops, textiles,
handicrafts, wood products, cement, electricity, cigarettes, beer and soft
drinks. That’s it. Everything else must be imported. Laos is so remote that it wasn’t
accessible by road until nearly the 21st century (probably the 80’s / early
90s). Most area businesses operate at laughably small profits in order to stay competitive;
they have to pay the same cost from imported products as they do in Thailand, plus the increased cost due to
reselling fees and taxation. So anything modern costs more than 2 to 10 times
more than in a developed country.

Interesting,
huh? So, anyway, we ate our food and spent a while in the Lao Lao bar playing
pool with the bartender, who was surprisingly amazing at pool and thrashed us.

On our
first full day in Luang Prabang we booked a mini-van for 50,000kip (that’s a
pretty good deal) to take us to the Kuang Si waterfalls. These waterfalls are
unimaginably beautiful, it was like stepping into a fairytale, it reminded me
of Rivendell in J.R.R Tolkiens ‘Lord of the Rings’. There were several pools
that branched out from beneath the tallest waterfall I had ever seen. It was
surrounded by gorgeous greenery and wildlife and the mood was so serene that I
felt like I could have swam in those pools forever.

On our bus
trip to the waterfall we met Sebina (a travel journalist from Germany), Tiana (a student wildlife
conservationist from Nevada) and her boyfriend Jeff (also from Nevada) who was visiting friends and
family in Thailand. We would spend the next few days
with these guys and we were really lucky to have bumped into them. On the way
back from the waterfall we stopped off at the Hmong village which I talked
about in my previous blog post but that I’m going to touch on again here. See,
we’ve been to a few more of these places now and we’ve seen some real Laos hill tribe villages along the road
on our journey to Vang Vieng (where we currently reside).

Most of the
community development projects like the Hmong village we were stopped at are a
front to sell items to tourists. They usually get the kids to do it, they’ll
run up to screaming ‘you buy, you buy’, Tiana said that it’s so bad in Cambodia
that the kids will say things like ‘if you don’t buy, I will cry’, but most of
the time the money won’t go to the kids and won’t even go to the village but
will end up to the supplier of the many bracelets and trinkets that they have
for sale. There was no doubt that it was a real Hmong village but it was
depressing that their lives had been reduced to selling this stuff to the
tourists who pass through, you question how much it really helps these people.
There are also hundreds and hundreds of kids in the village and this must be
down to the tradionalist way of thinking (I need as many kids as I can to look
after me when I’m old) mixed with the complete lack of access to any contraceptives.
We’ve seen a lot of this and it’s very sad. It’s not going to get any better
any time soon if things stay the same here in regards to funding and sustaining
these projects.

That night
we went to dinner with Sebina, Tiana and Jeff and were joined by a Malaysian
called Lee. Lee had been cycling from Malaysia, through Thailand and Laos for 48 days and his final
destination was China. He had already cycled over 2500km
and he was still rip-roaring on. He was 56 years old. He seemed pretty fed up
with his bike but was very happy that he was free and doing what he had always
dreamed of doing. He said every time that he is close to giving up he looks at
his bike thinks of how much t cost, and decides to keep going. He was quite the
character and he told us lots of stories about his travels and gave us a fair
insight into Laos.

The next
morning we got up and went for breakfast with Tiana and Jeff. Jeff proposed
that this specific restaurant did the best breakfast in Laos, well that maybe but the
conversation with the waitress went something like this:

Sean: I’ll
have the banana shake?

Waitress:
No.

Sean: No
banana?

Waitress:
No.

Sean: Ok,
I’ll just have a ginger tea?

Waitress:
No.

Sean: Just
a lipton tea?

Waitress:
Ok.

Sean: And
to eat, I’ll have the fruit salad?

Waitress:
No.

Sean: No
fruit?

Waitress:
No.

Sean: Wow!
Er, Natalie what do you want, they have no fruit.

Natalie:
I’ll have the banana and honey pancake?

Waitress:
No.

Sean: There
is no banana.

Natalie:
Oh.

Sean: I’ll
just have egg and bread.

Waitress:
Ok.

Natalie:
I’ll have the omelette.

Waitress:
Ok.

Hmmm, best
breakfast in Luang Prabang, huh? They had nothing and what they did have was
hardly anything to write about in this blog.

After
breakfast we met Sebina at the market, picked up some baguettes for lunch
(another French colonialist hangover) and headed out to the Pak Ou caves. To
get here you had to hire a boat at the pier so we spent some time haggling with
the boat captains to get a decent price, we finally scored one and headed out.
The boat was a rickety old thing that had an ant infestation but it was good
enough for us, the views along the Mekong were just as stunning as they were during the
slowboat trip and we had good conversation with Tiana, Jeff and Sebina to make
the ride go quickly.

The first
stop before the caves was a traditional village that specialises in making Lao
whiskey. Not another one of these again, we thought, but we stepped out and
strolled around for a while. They had lots of jars of whiskey filled with the
craziest things, whiskey with scorpion, whiskey with snake, whiskey with
centipede, whiskey with king cobra, whiskey with bears paws! BEARS PAWS! It was
revolting so we got back into the boat and set on our way wondering if anyone
actually buys any of that stuff.

We pulled
up at the caves about half an hour later, the caves are full of old discarded
Buddha images. You can’t touch them, and it’s considered a very holy place
rather than the dumping ground for old Buddhist statues, that it actually is.
The caves were very pretty though but didn’t go back very far, you could hear
the bats from up above your head which at least made Natalie happy, along with
the giant spiders we saw on the outskirts of the upper caves. The upper caves
were a little more impressive than the lower but were still pretty small, but
the views across the Mekong more than made up for that. We are planning to do
some caving here in Vang Vieng so we should have our cave fix by the end of our
time in Laos.

The journey
back went much quicker as we were travelling with the current, we exchanged some
money and sorted out our bus trip to Vang Vieng and did a little shopping in
the night market. We actually spent more than we probably should have but some
of the things on sale were just too beautiful to pass up, I actually managed to
get all of my Laos gifts at this market.

That
evening we met with Tiana and Jeff and had dinner and drinks and talked about
many a thing. I had buffalo which was the toughest meat I’ve ever had and it left
me with a massive toothache the following morning. Tiana and Jeff had never
tried soju so we went back to our hostel and all shared a bottle of the stuff
before curfew kicked in at midnight. It was great hanging out with them
for a few days and it broke our trip up a little bit as prior to this we had
been mostly doing things by ourselves. We wished them well as they were
venturing back into Thailand the following day and we settled in
for the night.

I woke up
with a rip-roaring hangover and toothache, but we had to be early to catch our
VIP bus to Vang Vieng. The VIP bit is a bit of a joke. I have never feared for
my life more than I feared for it on that bus journey. I had read tales of
Hmong rebels with guns on the highway who would hold up buses for money, we did
see some but luckily they didn’t hold us hostage, phewey, that wasn’t the most
treacherous thing about the journey however, it was the mental driving,
unstable roads, winding blind bends and high mountain drop offs that made it so
frightening. I clenched my eyes shut on a few occasions when I though we were done
for, alas, we made it and we’re now here in Vang Vieng.

Vang Vieng
is obviously a tale for another blog post and as usual I’ve ranted on for way
to long, so I’ll bid you all farewell, the rain has just stopped so we’re going
to head out to the caves and do some exploring. Thanks for reading!